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The Anesthesia Closed Claims Project database of more than 10,000 anesthesia malpractice claims can provide answers to ASA member questions through our Data Request service www.asaclosedclaims.org. Members have requested data on a wide variety of patient safety and liability questions. A recent theme among these requests has been eye injuries and eye surgery:

This article will provide an update on liability associated with anesthesia for eye surgery and trends in claims for eye injuries, combining answers to multiple ASA member data requests in one comprehensive report.

The Anesthesia Closed Claims Project database contains 7,351 surgical anesthesia claims. The remainder of the 10,093 claims in the database were associated with obstetric anesthesia, acute pain and chronic pain management. Eye surgery represents approximately 4-5 percent of all surgical anesthesia claims in the database, with a downward trend from 5-6 percent of surgical anesthesia claims in the 1970s-80s to 4 percent of surgical anesthesia claims in the 1990s and 2000s. We focused our analysis on surgical anesthesia claims from 1990 to 2012, comparing 184 anesthesia claims associated with eye surgery to 4,128 anesthesia claims for other surgical procedures.